Airbnb
Online marketplace for lodging with strong data science and infrastructure.
4 Rounds
~21 Days
Hard
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
Cloud Engineer
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Coding
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easy
Given a list of dictionaries representing EC2 instances with keys 'instance_id', 'cpu_utilization', 'days_running', and 'tags', write a function to return a list of instance IDs to terminate. Terminate instances under 5% CPU for over 7 days, but never terminate instances with the tag 'critical'.
#Data Structures
#Filtering
#Automation Logic
Data Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Write a Python function to parse a massive, multi-gigabyte server log file containing JSON-formatted search events. The function should return the top K most searched destination cities in O(N) time. Assume the file is too large to fit into memory.
#Python
#Generators
#Heaps
#File I/O
Data Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Airbnb's API sometimes returns deeply nested JSON dictionaries for listing amenities. Write a recursive Python function to flatten this dictionary so that the keys are concatenated with dots (e.g., 'amenities.kitchen.stove').
#Python
#Recursion
#Data Structures
#JSON Processing
Data Scientist
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Coding
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medium
Given a list of user session logs represented as tuples (user_id, timestamp, action), write a Python function to calculate the average session length. A session ends if there is 30 minutes of inactivity.
#Data Structures
#Parsing
#Python
#Time Complexity
Machine Learning Engineer
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Coding
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hard
Given an array of search results represented as strings (host_id, listing_id, score, city), paginate the results such that no two listings from the same host appear on the same page if possible, while maintaining the descending score order. Each page holds exactly N results.
#Hash Maps
#Greedy
#Queues
Machine Learning Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Given a dictionary of words and a string of characters (representing a user's misspelled search query), find the longest word in the dictionary that can be formed by deleting some characters from the given string.
#Two Pointers
#String Manipulation
#Sorting
Machine Learning Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Given a list of booking requests represented as intervals [start_date, end_date] and an associated profit for each, write a function to find the maximum profit you can make without accepting overlapping bookings.
#Dynamic Programming
#Sorting
#Intervals
Software Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Given a list of flights represented by source, destination, and price, and an integer K representing the maximum number of stops, find the cheapest flight from a starting city to a destination.
#Graph Traversal
#Dijkstra's Algorithm
#Breadth-First Search
#Dynamic Programming
Software Engineer
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Coding
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hard
Given an array of integers representing the nightly rates of an Airbnb listing over a month, find the maximum profit you can make by buying and selling a block of dates, with a mandatory cooldown period of 1 day between bookings.
#Dynamic Programming
#State Machines
#Optimization
Software Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Implement a time-based key-value store. You need to support `set(key, value, timestamp)` and `get(key, timestamp)` which returns the value set at the closest time at or before the given timestamp.
#Hash Maps
#Binary Search
#Data Structures
Software Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Implement a simplified version of a rate limiter that allows 'n' requests per 't' seconds for a given user ID. How would you scale this across multiple servers?
#Rate Limiting
#Sliding Window
#Distributed Systems
Software Engineer
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Coding
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hard
Given a 2D board of characters representing a map grid and a list of words representing points of interest, find all words present in the board. Words can be constructed from letters of sequentially adjacent cells.
#Trie
#Backtracking
#Depth-First Search
Software Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Given a string representing a CSV file, parse it into a 2D array. Handle commas inside quotes, escaped quotes, and newlines within quoted fields properly.
#String Manipulation
#Parsing
#State Machines
Difficulty Radar
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The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
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Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.